Sunrise greeted Rachel Held Evans differently on Easter morning in 2011.
Through the red-and-white canvas of her camping tent, the Sunday sunbeams fell across her face as she slept in an Army-green sleeping bag on a grass-green lawn in front of her modest red-brick home.
She shared the home with her newlywed husband, Dan, who — for that year — Evans called “master.”
Since beginning her “Year of Biblical Womanhood” in October 2010, that Easter morning was Evans’ 84th sunrise in the tent.
Evans wrote about her Easter tent morning on her blog, a blog with essays now compiled into a posthumous book release under Evans’ name, “Braving the Truth: Essential Essays for Reckoning With and Reimagining Faith” (HarperOne).
If Evans’ lawn camping sounds like a gimmick, it wasn’t.
Evans was more than gimmick. She was gumption.
While her year-long experiment is what brought national attention to Evans, her first book, “Evolving in Monkey Town,” already proved Evans had something substantial to say — and she was in the right place to say it.
The daughter of a Bible professor at Bryan College in Dayton — a college town and a college historically tied to the Scopes Trial, the 1925 trial that, like Evans’ work, fostered a national dialogue about biblical literalism and fundamentalism — Evans was a child of Dayton and a graduate of Bryan with an English degree. She went on to work as a reporter in the community.
Bryan College, a Christian liberal arts college that would be founded in honor of and named after William Jennings Bryan, the gifted orator, presidential candidate and attorney of the Scopes trial, would become a college that valued rhetoric and discussions of the Christian worldview.
That training in rhetoric and reasoning, words and worldview, would come to serve Evans, whose essays and experiments drew a national audience.
‘JESUS HONORED WOMEN’
Her first book was about her own evolution.
Next, Evans would write about her search for authentic Christianity in “Searching for Sunday,” and then document the perils of the Levitical Old Testament law while sleeping 12 days a month on her front lawn in a tent, baking homemade bread, covering her head, calling her husband “master” and retreating to the rooftop when she felt ornery in her book, “A Year of Biblical Womanhood.”
Long after Evans rolled up her sleeping bag, tents would remain a theme as Evans’ influence and ideas went from small town to big top.
In fact, Evans would later come to describe her theology on Christianity as a “big tent”– a faith wide enough to shelter skeptics, seekers and believers who never quite fit the mold.
That vision returns in “Braving the Truth,” edited by Sarah Bessey, published Feb. 24. The book gathers writings from across Evans’ career, tracing how a blogger and author formed in Dayton became one of the most influential Christian voices of her generation.
Like other female pioneers who spent time in tents, Evans tamed a trail so that other women could pass more safely, more easily, more … talkatively.
Lorrie Slater, director of the Henegar Counseling Center, a Christian facility in Chattanooga, spoke of the importance of words and writing for women looking for agency — especially spiritual agency.
“I think generally women are finding their voice, be it women of faith, women of color, culturally women are finding our voices,” said Slater, who holds a doctorate in counseling education and supervision. “I don’t know quite where it began … did it begin with the suffragists or the ’60s? Or the Me Too movement? (But we always) see women stand up when it is necessary. We see Deborah. We see Mary. We see Martha.
“Jesus honored women. Whether we are treated as less than, that’s not how he treated us,” Slater said, “Writing? It’s a safe way … to have your voice. You can’t quiet my voice and my words once they are out there. It’s a natural, normal medium. It’s a way to get our voices out there.”
Excerpt
This month, as part of my year of biblical womanhood, I’m submitting to taharat hamishpach, or “family purity,” as described in Leviticus 15–18. This means I am ceremonially unclean for a total of 12 days. For those 12 days, I can have no physical contact with my husband (no sex, no hugging, no affectionate pats on the back), and no physical contact with men (no handshakes, no high-fives, no passing of items like salt and pepper shakers). I cannot attend official religious services, and anything I sit on is considered unclean, so I’ve taken to carrying around my Rhea County High School Golden Eagle stadium seat cushion everywhere I go.
As a nod to the storied “red tents” of the biblical matriarchs (which scholars are uncertain actually existed), I spent the first three days and two nights of my niddah (“removal/separation”) camping out in the front yard. Thankfully, the weather was fantastic and I slept surprisingly well. But that didn’t keep a few wild hyenas — which I’ve been told were more likely cats — from scaring the crap out of me in the middle of the night.
On the upside, this is the first time I’ve ever woken up for the sunrise on Easter Sunday! So Happy Easter from the Red Tent. Even here…especially here…I am so thankful that He is risen.
A SEAT AT THE TABLE
For a recently ordained lay pastor, Melody Day of The Mission Red Bank, a church musician and pianist who grew up in the Independent Baptist Fundamentalist movement — a movement that does not recognize women in positions of pastoral leadership — writers like Evans helped her think “differently about her calling.”
After reading authors like Evans, Day felt like she “had a seat at the table.”
Day recalls the first time she was invited to pray in a meeting moderated by her pastor at The Mission Red Bank, the Rev. Al Allison.
“The pastors invited me to pray, and I was given the last word,” said Day, who came from the Presbyterian Church of America. “I never felt so validated as a woman of faith.
“Rachel Held Evans showed me that claiming space and speaking truth as a woman in the church is sacred work,” Day said, “coming from PCA and Baptist backgrounds, it felt like the world had opened up — freeing, welcoming and exactly how it should have been.”
This is the kind of big-tent vision that Evans dreamed of and wrote about.
As social media and her influence expanded, Evans found herself on stages with leading thinkers and writers, contributing to national conversations about faith, gender and the role of women in the church. Sharing the stage with authors like Shauna Niequist, Glennon Doyle and Jen Hatmaker, Evans’ reach expanded beyond her tent, beyond her Dayton front yard lawn, beyond Bryan College, beyond Dayton and beyond the Bible Belt.
(READ MORE: ‘She left us mid-sentence’: Rachel Held Evans’ lasting legacy, one year after her death)
In 2019, at the age of 37, Evans died unexpectedly.
Evans’ big top tent vision lived on through her words — words like those found in “Braving the Truth.”
Despite her expansive vision, Evans never left Dayton, never left Monkey Town, never left neighbors who had been her college professors or knew her when she was little.
Neighbors knew her when her minister father preached while she squirmed beside them on their church pew. They knew her when she camped on her lawn or retreated to her rooftop, knew her before she questioned, when she questioned, after she questioned.
Evans stayed.
In the end, Evans found that whether small tent or big tent, in her mind, Christianity — Christ — was about community.
Evans already had that in Dayton, in Monkey Town, among neighbors Jesus had told Evans to love as she loved herself. Even as she evolved.
“They reminded me that Christianity isn’t meant to simply be believed; it’s meant to be lived, shared, eaten, spoken and enacted in the presence of other people,” Evans wrote in “Searching for Sunday.” “They reminded me that, try as I may, I can’t be a Christian on my own. I need a community. I need the church.”
Contact religion reporter Millicent Smith at msmith@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6476.